Warhammer 40000: Space Wolf review

Hey there, you are listening the “speck that is in your brother’s eye” show.

This time we will take a look into the eye of the Warhammer 40000: Space Wolf by Herocraft.

Let’s start from the fact that that it’s the one of the biggest games of the 2014 in AppStore and definitely one of the greatest hits made by Russian companies in terms of production quality.

The game got featured on the main banner in Appstore in about 60 countries and more than 2000 positions in ratings all around the world. Received ( and continues to receive) Awards from various game portals, but, there is a big BUT. Average rating is just 2.7 stars and download ratings are far from good despite the massive promotion and the famous franchise.

The game has stunning visuals, solid GUI and the gameplay mechanic has a huge potential.

The Short point is: take command of the space marines squad and complete tasks in turn based battles with Chaos hordes. Basically, mission’s tasks are reduced to classic strategic goals — secure a strategic point, kill the boss and so on. In addition, every mission has a side subtask — find and get the special box, where you can find extra reward and one additional golden skull. Golden skulls are an interesting interpretation of experience.

Your character level ups when collecting the certain amount of golden skulls. One skull is a main task reward and every side goal gives you one extra skull. So if you want to level up fast — do not give up on those boxes.

The fight are completely turn based and in my point of view this is a first problem — missions are too long. I spent about 20–30 mins to complete one mission and it hurts when you lose close to the goal and have to start all over again. There is a relief — Runes of Life, which you can buy for cash and allowing you to revive your character once per battle. That’s ok when you pay cash, but if not — I rather give up than restart the half-hour mission third time.

So,

Problem 1 — Too long and slow missions.

Solution — no idea, that’s a basis for this kind of games and there is no sense to change it now. You just have to take into account that making such gameplay pace you cut off a significant part of the auditory, those who can not afford to invest so much time at once.

Let’s take a look at mechanics.

Each space marine has a deck with action card (just like in the Heartstone). There are 33 cards, divided into 3 categories: action cards (activated immediately after use), equipment cards (should be equipped first to the special slot and you can use it as a dedicated action) and movement cards (non-battle actions like Move or Withdraw cards). Every turn space marine can perform 2 actions — use card or sacrifice it for move points.

And there is the next problem appears.

Problem 2. Cards mechanics.

Players didn’t get the idea of the cards sacrificing, the appstore is full of whine comments saying that move cards are too rare (usually 2–3 in a deck) and fights are too slow — they just can not tumble to sacrifice the card.

Solution. Moreover, cards are too similar to each other by pictures, by description, by effects and information layout is not the best possible one. I’m already in the middle of the campaign and did not get the idea of the game tactic. Just using the most powerful damage card I have at the moment. While the game is designed to be tactical and there is a special parameter — Effort, defining the movie queue and every card usage increases your effort counter by the defined amount. Effort queue calculations are too complicated and, what is way more important, useless.

Add more differentiation to the cards’ functionality. The Move/Equipment/Damage differentiation as well as the differentiation inside the category. For example, add cards with DOT. buff/debuff cards, status cards — paralysis, confusion etc. Strongly differentiate weapons’ damage and number of bursts. Write an understandable card effect description on one card side, decrease the importance of the Effort, or vice versa — strongly increase its importance so players can not ignore it. The most profitable tactic at the moment is a Rush, do not think it is what tactical fanatics will be excited about.

And there is the…

Problem 3. Movement stiffness

Okay, they are huge guys packed in a power armor, I’ve got it, but I feel uncomfortable because of that clumsiness. It is terrible when I can’t fight back not only the enemy behind me, but even side ones. To attack I should spend a few turns to bypass them. It looks way more masochistic than tactical.

Solution.

Get rid of that mechanic. Let characters move and attack in any direction. Withal, we can keep the character’s direction influence, for example as a multiplicator for attacks from the side or from behind.

Also, counterattacks will bring more live and action to fights. Yep, that’s a bold move, but turn-based fights with counterattacks feel so much better and dynamic than without it.

We need to move deeper. Deck management. Oh boy, that’s a real pain. I am the one who played Rage of Bahamut, who is a fan of Blood brothers and other hardcore games with such a barbarous UI. But even there I never teared from inability to understand wtf is going on here and how to build my deck. It is not clear, which cards are equipped and which are not, how many are there, which cards are valuable and which are a crap? — and this is the Fourth problem.

Solution.

Rework the deck management interface from scratch. In my opinion, attempt to shove the Hearthstone’s system is failed here. Deck management needs more visual interpretation than a sidebar list. The wall of plates makes no sense, especially when the tap on the plate leads removing it from the list instead of showing me the card info, and now I can not even remember what the card was it. The same point is about the Evolution and Disassemble (yep, they are also here), it is not clear which cards are equipped and which are not, which cards are able to disassemble, and moreover cards are stacked in piles where some cards can be one level and equipped and some cards can be another level and not equipped. Absolute Chaos. I spend 2 days to figure things out. Most players can not afford 2 days for that.

Okay, we disassembled our cards to gears so let’s take a look on the beloved Craft.

The idea of crafting is quite interesting. There are several difficulty levels: the higher the difficulty, the more chances to get a high-grade card. But at the same time you have a higher chance to fail and need more resources to craft. The fun part is that there is no point to craft cards, not on the max difficulty level. Because only Legendary cards are matter and it is the only real way to craft them — use the extreme difficulty level. So it is a Hobson’s choice — I realized that after just a few crafts, that means players will crack that nut too. If you offer 10 options and one of them is useless it’s not a big deal. But if you give 10 options and 9 of 10 are useless — that’s a big design problem. Furthermore, if your craft attempt failed and the card is destroyed you will get nothing — I bet, this is the player’s rage moment. It might be good to give something to the player, something not expensive but valuable because just taking player’s resources away leads to hate.

Solution.

Spread more success chances and profit of craft difficulty levels, eliminate the unambiguous strategy. Give away something on fail — for example, cash back 30% of gears, or 1–2 simple trash cards.

And now, it’s time to heavy metal.

The game has 3 locations with 5 missions each. It means that the content of the game is finite, and what is the saddest, ends quickly. With reasonable efforts, you can beat the game in one day. Thats the paid product’s strategy, not the free to play where players can play for years. It’s clear that resources were limited but if so it is crucial to focus on procedural content, missions replayability, random encounters, and grind. Space Wolf has no long-term goals, you can not immerse into it and get your friends with you.

I know for a fact that there will be a PvP update soon, which should help this game a lot. I really hope so.

According to users’ reviews, one more issue here is a requirement of a permanent connection to the internet during a play. It is so to prevent fraud and validate all the actions on the server side. The point is that in “online” games like Blood Brothers or Clash of Clans this requirement is organic by the game’s online nature — I play with other people and it is reasonable that the game wants me to have a connection. But when a heavy, hardcore and most importantly, the singleplayer game requires a permanent connection — it sounds unreasonable.

There are several solutions:

Positioning the game as an online experience, but then all main mechanics should be based on the interactions between players. At least they should seem so.

Or allow players to play offline and protect the game from cracking on the client (and if it’s an offline only game maybe we should just let cheaters have fun?)

Combine offline and online modes as is done in, for example, League of War — the grindy campaign is available offline while purchases, PvP, clan activities are online only.

And you always should remember, popular hardcore franchise is always coming along with hardcore fans, which know what the game should be better than you and alway will be super picky about the products based on their fetish.